May 13th

In this time of Pentecost...

A Reflection on Baptism

My grandma often tells me about her baptism experience, and it’s a story I never grow tired of listening to. She tells me about how my grandpa was driving her home after their final preparatory session before being baptized and along the way, he had to pull off the road and into a neighbouring farm access as they both became overwhelmed with the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon them. They talked to each other about their shared experience with great joy right up until my grandpa’s death, and my grandma still talks about it as if it happened yesterday.

I was baptized at the age of sixteen. I understood well enough what getting baptized meant, but I mainly I wanted to take part in Communion and while our Disciples/United Church congregation didn’t hold to a strictly closed table, it was still important to my mom that one be baptized first. So I got baptized. It was beautiful and meaningful, but it wasn’t complete; the sprinkling of water upon my head was only the beginning of a long process.

I think of the phase of my life following this as my prodigal years. I was only just beginning to discover the complex, queer person God had built me to be, and in the 2000’s, the church wasn’t the easiest place to make those explorations. So I wandered. I wandered, searching for something that could tap into those flashes of spiritual connection I had experienced as a child: reading my little red Gideon’s New Testament, living the power of the Passion at a Good Friday reenactment, even the mundane joy of learning to say Grace with my grandma. I had faith in there being something greater than me, but I didn’t trust that I would be able to find that in Christianity.

Of course, I didn’t find anything out there that wasn’t a faint shadow or my own flimsy fabrication. Eventually, inevitably, I was drawn back towards the church. I became open to the calling on my spirit and enrolled at Alberta Bible College. It was there at the age of thirty-three, while on a silence and solitude retreat with my class, that I felt powerfully and overwhelmingly the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon me. Seventeen years after it had begun—a longer period of time than I had spent unbaptized—my baptism reached its fulfillment.

But my journey with Christ hasn’t ended there, not by any means. This is a relationship that has only grown deeper and richer as time goes on and as I continue to serve God through the church. A couple of years ago, I made my confession of faith at Camp Valaqua, becoming an official member of Calgary First Mennonite Church. After all three of her daughters ended up in other denominations, my grandma is thrilled to have a Mennonite grandchild. We often talk to each other about our baptism experiences, and it really does feel as though it happened yesterday.